In the spring of 2009, Michael Gustafson’s cousin e-mailed him to say she was granting him permission to date her best friend, Hilary Lowe. He was grateful, but there was one problem: He had never heard of Lowe, let alone met her. “I had no idea who this person was, but I e-mailed her and said, ‘I’ve been given permission to date you,’” Gustafson recalls.

“That was your opening line?” I ask. It’s February 2013, and Gustafson, Lowe, and I are sitting in a café in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan, just up the block from the gutted storefront that the couple is trying to turn into a new community-minded independent venture: Literati Bookstore.

“Pretty much,” Lowe replies. Gustafson smiles, a bit bashful behind his glasses. She continues: “It was weird and goofy. What was I going to say? I loved it!”

At the time, Gustafson was living with his parents in Michigan, just outside Grand Rapids, having decided to leave Los Angeles, where he’d worked as an assistant on several television programs after finishing a film degree at Northwestern. But a few seasons in the business made him realize that his future wasn’t in Hollywood. Lowe, meanwhile, was living in New York City, working as a sales rep for Simon & Schuster. After their initial contact they began corresponding by e-mail, and within a few weeks they were sending each other books.

“That was our way of courting,” Lowe says. “We would just send each other books. I had never read Harry Potter, and so he sent me Harry Potter. And my favorite book was Too Loud a Solitude. It’s by Bohumil Hrabal—a book about loving books.” Six weeks passed before they ever spoke on the phone, while the words of authors—from Kittredge to Camus—passed back and forth between them.

“I fell in love with the way we communicated before I even knew what you looked like,” Gustafson says, the conversation shifting away from me and settling between the two of them.

“And it was never small talk,” Lowe tells him. “It was always just weird, nerd rants to each other.” She laughs. It’s a laugh that makes Gustafson smile again.

Sitting in a cozy café, a swirl of snow outside the 
frost-glazed windows and this young couple across the table from me, I suddenly feel as though I’ve stumbled into a Nora Ephron movie. The casting and plot are spot-on: Attractive, intellectual twentysomethings—of the earnest, nonhipster variety—fall for each other via an epistolary romance. Cue the film montage: Gustafson arrives in Manhattan a few months later, he and Lowe spend a romantic fall dating in New York City, and the following year they move in together. In November 2011 they get engaged (close-up of the ring), in July 2012 they move to Ann Arbor with the sole purpose of opening a bookstore together (long shot of a U-Haul on the highway heading west), and in January 2013 they sign a lease and begin construction (dial up the sounds of saws and hammers).

There’s also plenty of dramatic tension to this tale. Remember that Ann Arbor is the birthplace of Borders, which brothers Tom and Louis Borders opened in 1971, while students at the University of Michigan. In 2011, when the company went bankrupt, it closed hundreds of stores, including the forty-thousand-square-foot flagship in Ann Arbor. The city was also home to iconic independent bookstore Shaman Drum—the Drum, as it’s known to the locals—which closed in the summer of 2009 after nearly thirty years in business. Six years earlier, a small plaque had been erected by the membership of the State Street Area Improvement Project to honor the Drum’s owner, Karl Pohrt, stating with simple thanks: “He kept our eyes on the prize….” The plaque still remains, a bittersweet reminder that Pohrt was able to help revitalize this downtown, but unable to weather the increasingly harsh climate of bookselling, which over the course of the past two decades has swept away nearly 75 percent of the seven thousand independent bookstores that once existed nationwide—more than a thousand of which closed between 2000 and 2007. In the years since, hundreds more have gone out of business, including the Drum.

Perhaps the economic tide of the country as a whole has turned. Or perhaps, more likely, Lowe and Gustafson have chosen exactly the right city at exactly the right time with exactly the right sort of store to succeed. As of Literati’s six-month anniversary, they seem to be making a go of it. But for the couple, whose initial meeting and blossoming relationship seemed somehow preordained, the success of their store up to this point has been no accident. The owners of Literati Bookstore are filled not only with exuberant optimism and staunch idealism, but also with practical determination. And most important, they have a business model to back up each step of the process.

Last February, however, Lowe and Gustafson’s vision of the bookstore was still forming, and the success of Literati Bookstore, much less its opening, was far from certain. After finishing our coffee, we hike through the snow to check out the progress on the renovation of the twenty-six-hundred-square-foot storefront at 124 East Washington Street—most recently the 2010 campaign offices for Republican Governor Rick Snyder—a space split equally between two floors: street-level and basement. Prior to Gustafson and Lowe’s negotiating their lease, the building stood empty for several years. (When they first showed it to me, in mid-January 2013, it was a wreck—particularly the basement, which was to account for half their floor space. Torn-up carpeting lay heaped in piles of debris, an exposed gas meter poked out of the fieldstone wall by the stairwell, and the uneven concrete floor looked like something you’d find in an old barn. No matter how long I listened to the couple describe their vision for this space, when I looked around all I saw was a basement.)

When we arrive at the store a month after that first visit, kicking the snow off our boots, the changes are dramatic. The basement joists are painted a fresh matte black, recessed lighting is in place along with new ductwork, and installation has begun on the first bookcases of the fifty such units they salvaged from the downtown Borders. The look is urban and chic, and I realize that these two not only have a precise dream for their store, but also a healthy dose of the midwestern work ethic needed to make it happen.  

Of course, not everything is going according to plan. The wood floors upstairs have had to be torn out and are being replaced. Not only does this represent a significant cost that Gustafson and Lowe haven’t budgeted, but it’s also meant they’re having to push back their early-March opening. And with each delay, the complex calculus of how long they can stretch their seed money until the first book sales begin to provide even a modest cash flow is enough to make the most seasoned businessperson a bit fidgety. Inventory alone will account for more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars of their start-up costs—which they are paying for with a significant loan from Ann Arbor State Bank plus smaller, but no less significant, loans from family and friends—and that’s a modest number of books for a store this size (a number they will try to nearly double over the summer as they begin to sell and are able to increase their stock), to say nothing of the overall costs associated with building out the store.

The couple is also aware of the fact that in addition to trying to make a go of it in a town where neither Borders nor Shaman Drum was able to succeed, it’s not as though it’s an open market. Ann Arbor is home to specialty bookshops like Common Language Bookstore, Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop, Vault of Midnight, Bookbound, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room; used-book stores like Dawn Treader, West Side Book Shop, and Motte & Bailey Booksellers; and even a general indie bookstore, Nicola’s Books, on the west side of town. Plus, there’s a Barnes & Noble. Each of these stores has loyal customers. So despite months of outreach to the local community, there’s no guarantee that, as a general (albeit well-curated) bookshop, their enterprise will see customers materialize when the doors open.

What, then, does Literati hope to be known for? How will it distinguish itself from these other places of business? “The goal is that every book in our store is carefully selected,” Gustafson says. “And that it would be a great book for whatever it is: a great kids’ tale, or a great biography, whatever. I often ask Hilary, ‘Do you want to read this?’ And if she says no, I’ll say, ‘Well, why are we ordering it then?’”

“Of course it’s not just my taste,” Lowe clarifies. “It’s balancing what’s selling and what I think the community would want with what I like. Those are the three things I base my decisions on. I’ve tried to go through every single title that we’re going to have.” When I ask how many titles they’ve ordered so far, Lowe estimates seven or eight thousand. It’s still only February.

Over the next month and a half I visit periodically to chat about progress and to take pictures of some of the milestones: the day the new floors are put in, the day the bookcases arrive upstairs, even the night Lowe and Gustafson paint the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the floor, the two of them, in stocking feet, stepping carefully between each square they’ve mapped using blue painter’s tape, as they cover the entire grid, foot by square foot. When I drop in I typically find them in the basement: Lowe working on a laptop, placing orders, in what will one day be a sitting area; Gustafson in their small, six-by-eight-foot office in the back corner, working on the website or dealing with other business issues, such as the botched order of fifteen thousand book-marks that need to be returned. Or their proposal for an exterior sign for the storefront that was denied by Ann Arbor’s Historic District Commission, sending them back to the drawing board. But worst of all, they are informed by the city that their entire street will be torn up and closed for sewer and utility repairs during the month of June and part of July.

Despite these setbacks, by mid-March they’re excited about their progress—staffing, in particular. More than one hundred fifty people applied to work at the store, and they’ve brought in a range of talents and experience: several longtime Borders employees, one of whom, Jeanne Joesten, worked for the company for nearly twenty-five years; the former manager of Shaman Drum; two recent grads from the University of Michigan’s MFA program; and the executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, who plans to work part-time so as to stay in touch with what’s happening day-to-day in independent stores.

“Every employee is doing something extra,” Lowe says—from finding used furniture at nearby Treasure Mart, to helping write store policies and procedures addressing issues such as shoplifting.

“Apparently you can’t tackle [people] until they get out of the store,” Gustafson says.

“You can’t even accuse them!” Lowe adds. “That was news to us.”

On March 26 Literati passes the city inspection, and a few days later, on March 30, the store debuts with a private party for members of the literary community. Despite the long hours, on this night Gustafson and Lowe both glow. She wears a black-and-white checked sleeveless dress with a black, bolero-style shrug, and her hair up in a bun. He wears a blue oxford. And the two never stop smiling. The store, too, has the soft, yellowed warmth that you imagine a bookstore having. Like burnished oak. Like varnished maple.

The vibe is equally homey. Writers and members of the university community, as well as local business owners and supporters, arrive for their first glimpse of the new bookstore. There is food and wine and good spirits. There are bright books filling the shelves. And for the first time, the community that Gustafson and Lowe have spent so much time talking with me about—a community of book lovers and readers—is no longer an abstract concept. It is here. I’m not sure what might be going through people’s minds, but all I can envision is the fact that a little over two months ago this space was vacant, and in the ensuing weeks it has been utterly transformed.

The following day is Easter, which comes early this year, as does the unexpected spring weather. It was forecast to be cool and rainy, but instead the day dawns feeling more like May. That evening I drop by Literati to check on preparations for next week’s opening, and when I arrive I encounter another surprise: a store full of people. Gustafson and Lowe have decided at the last minute to have a “soft opening” today. I find them in the downstairs office, ordering more books, and they are positively giddy. I ask what prompted this decision. “At noon we opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon that was dropped off last night,” Gustafson tells me, “and we had a toast with the employees who were here. Then we just decided to flip the sign to Open to see what would happen. We figured we could get some practice swiping a credit card or two. But in a minute and a half there were three people in here. In just ninety seconds! It’s been a steady stream of people since.”

“I’m just so happy we’re open and talking to people,” Lowe tells me.

“Today was absolutely incredible,” Gustafson says.

“Making recommendations, talking about books,” Lowe adds. “That’s why I wanted to do this.” I haven’t seen the two so energized since January, when they first showed me around the empty space and were explaining the vision of the store. The last few months have been hard ones for them, filled with endless financial calculations and guesses. They’ve been living on energy bars and take-out, leaving the store most nights after midnight. But here, finally, their business is a reality.

Gustafson says, “My favorite thing that happened today? Two college girls walked in. One of them said, ‘This is the best day.’ She didn’t say ‘of the week,’ or ‘of the year.’ She just said, ‘This is the best day.’ I loved that.”

It didn’t hurt that within the first six hours of being open, without any advertising whatsoever, the store sold more than two hundred books, bringing in over thirty-four hundred dollars in sales. In the middle of it all they ran out of receipt paper and Gustafson had to drive to OfficeMax.

A little more than a week later, however, Literati would come close to nearly losing the entirety of its first week’s sales—more than twenty thousand dollars—an amount far exceeding the figures for a normal week, as it includes the revenue from the grand opening and the store’s inaugural event with poet Keith Taylor, a reading that drew more than a hundred people. Such a loss would have almost certainly forced it to close.

Nine days after opening for business the store’s Internet went down. Thinking the router simply needed to be reset, Gustafson did so. But in the process he knocked out both the cash registers, causing the credit card processing machines to malfunction. Worried they might have lost that morning’s sales in the process, Gustafson called their credit card authorization company to double-check that the previous day’s transactions had cleared and were successfully deposited. What he learned was that there had been no deposits the previous night; in fact, there hadn’t been a single deposit since the store had opened.

“We’re engaged. So this isn’t just the business, it’s our relationship—and Hilary is furious,” Gustafson recalls.

“Meanwhile,” Lowe says, “customers are coming in, and regulars are coming down to chat.” They both laugh about trying to keep up a good front, about Lowe sobbing in the bathroom at one point, about Gustafson envisioning them bankrupt and on the street. It’s clear just how terrifying this moment must have been after nearly a year of solid work, how fragile the entire endeavor must have suddenly felt. 

It all turned out to be, of course, a simple mistake. The credit card company discovered that Literati had failed to complete the protocol necessary to send the transactions in for processing at the end of each night. “The directions were at the bottom of an ALL-CAPS e-mail that had no punctuation, something you could totally miss,” Gustafson explains. And the instructions had come in an account-set-up 
e-mail they’d received from the company nearly two months before they’d even opened.

But despite the ease with which the problem was solved, it was nearly an irrevocable loss. The credit card processing company explained that any transactions not submitted within ten days are void. They were on Day Nine.

“If you don’t batch out within ten days…” Gustafson begins.

“You lose everything,” Lowe finishes.

There are other missteps and disappointments throughout the summer—the books that don’t arrive for an author event, forcing Gustafson to drive to Barnes & Noble to pick up copies; the occasional angry customer who writes on Literati’s Facebook page that the store is “snooty”; the unexpected bust of football Saturdays—yet when we sit down in mid-October for our final talk, just after the six-month anniversary of the store’s opening, things are going pretty well. Although Lowe admits to being conservative with the business plan, sales have exceeded expectations. Both are realistic in acknowledging that some of this might have to do with the novelty of the store, that the goodwill from the community might not last. But already they have a solid community of regulars whose tastes in reading and whose personalities they’ve begun to get to know. And publishers are starting to reach out to them about events with notable authors.

They’re also aware that this is a particular cultural moment they’ve found themselves in. The independent bookstore dovetails nicely with the craft movement currently afoot in cities like Ann Arbor. It’s not simply because books are crafted, physical objects, but because in addition to a hand-selected inventory, quite literally everything in Literati has been touched by human hands. The hand-lettered window signs were drawn by a local artist, the chalkboard’s painted section headings were done by Gustafson’s mother, the shopping bags bearing the Literati logo were hand-stamped by employees, and the secondhand tables were picked up at thrift stores by the staff.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies this cultural moment more than the manual typewriter in the sitting area in the basement. Each morning Gustafson adds paper to it, and throughout the day people come down to type. Some come to the store to type. They leave love notes, dirty jokes, and the occasional anonymous plea for help. They leave poems and to-do lists and affirmations. One woman even proposed to her partner using it. Here, again, it’s about something tangible—something we can feel with our hands. And though the notes are seemingly ephemera, Gustafson reads them all and saves many, posting them on their basement wall—a record of the store’s days.

So the practice of curation at Literati is about more than just picking books. It’s about handcrafting an experience, from selecting the people who work for you and who bring their personalities and tastes to the store to the look and feel of the place. When I speak with Lori Tucker-Sullivan, the executive director of the Independent Booksellers Consortium, about why Literati is succeeding, she points to two factors: “First, they came into the market not only willing to work in the midst of other booksellers in town, but also actually reaching out to them and structuring their business in light of what those already established bookstores do well. Second, Hilary and Mike have a remarkable understanding of the Ann Arbor market, and it is well reflected in their inventory and events, which are a near-perfect mix of literary, scholarly, and popular titles. When bookstore owners are that smart it shows, and they tend to be successful. They also have a very good understanding of what they can be—and online cannot—in terms of the shopping experience, and they’ve done a wonderful job of developing that sense of discovery and adventure in a small space.”

In a sense, Literati is the opposite of Amazon: Lowe and Gustafson don’t carry everything, intentionally; their selectivity is a service. By carefully curating their selection, they save their customers the toil of having to wade upstream through an endless torrent of book marketing and hyperbole. After all, can every novel really be a tour de force? The recommendations here are genuine as well; there’s no algorithm that can determine what book you might like. Instead, each book appears on the shelf because someone believes it’s worth reading.

When I ask Lowe and Gustafson what additional advice they have for someone thinking about opening a bookstore, their suggestions range from the practical (make sure you have enough money; the cheapest option is not always the best; be tough on lease negotiations) to the more esoteric (maximize the talent of your employees; invest in what will pay off for the life of your business; trust your gut).

“Anybody who tries to open a business is going to be called a fool,” Lowe says, “no matter the endeavor. Yeah, a bookstore is risky. But if you’ve done your homework, you should feel comfortable with what you’re doing.”

Gustafson elaborates on Lowe’s extensive research into the bookselling market, the months she volunteered at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, in exchange for shadowing the owners, her extensive business plan, and her unwavering vision for the store. There’s pride in his voice, and I watch her watching him as he tries to convey the scope of this to me. They’ve been married three months. The two days they took for their honeymoon in June were the first consecutive days away from the business since beginning this process a year ago.

Then, after a pause, Gustafson says, “We were talking recently about whether we would do this again, knowing—”

“God, no!” Lowe interrupts. “You couldn’t pay me enough.”

Both of them are roaring with laughter now.

“Neither of us would ever go through this again,” Gustafson says.

“Nope,” Lowe says. “I’d work as a waitress.”

“The nerves, the anxiety…we really did feel like we had one shot. We still do feel like we have just one shot. And we know we’re not out of the woods yet.”

But they both admit they’re happy. “We’re not ever going to have a lot of money,” Lowe says. “But that’s fine. I love our regulars. Just having conversations with them brightens my day. I wouldn’t have had these sorts of interactions with people sitting at my desk at Simon & Schuster.”

On my way out, I linger for a bit, browsing the fiction section. Two employees have finished their shift and are headed out. I watch Lowe come around the side of the cash register to hug each of them, thanking them for their work that day. It seems obvious that the employees are just as thankful to be there, to have found their bookstore.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is the assistant director of the English Department Writing Program. He is the editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review as well as a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.